Glossary

The vocabulary Diffuse uses, in one place.

Slice

A contiguous range of a model's layers, written start:end, held by one node. The unit Diffuse splits a model into.

Stage

One step in the pipeline: the node (or nodes) that run a given slice. A request passes through the stages in order.

Node

A machine on the network. It may be a host (holding a slice and serving compute), a client (running chat, query, or serve), or both.

Client

A machine that uses the network. It tokenizes locally and drives generation but holds no model weights by default.

Host

A node running diffuse host. It holds a slice, announces it over gossip, and serves compute to clients. Hosting is how the network exists.

Sentinel

A well-known node used for bootstrap discovery and, when needed, as an encrypted relay for peers behind NAT.

Gossip

The protocol by which nodes exchange their view of the network with a few peers at a time, so knowledge of who is online spreads without any central registry.

Replica

An additional node holding the same slice as another. Replicas share load and keep a model servable when one holder disappears.

Servable

A model is servable when every layer range is covered by at least one live node, so a request can flow end to end. diffuse models lists only servable models.

Robust, fragile, incomplete

The three coverage states of a model. Robust: fully covered and above the target replication. Fragile: fully covered but some slice has a single holder. Incomplete: some layer range is held by nobody, so it is not servable.

Relay

An encrypted forwarding path through a sentinel that lets a node behind NAT serve compute. The relay carries ciphertext only.

Activation, hidden state

The tensor of numbers passed between stages. It is the model's internal representation of the input at a given depth, not the text itself.

KV cache

The stored keys and values of previous tokens, kept per session on each node so attention does not reprocess the whole prompt every step.

Session

One generation, identified by a unique id. Its KV cache is cleared when generation ends, so no state is shared between requests.

Node id

A node's Ed25519 public key, which is its identity. Peers are keyed by node id, not by network address.